day three

when was the last time you sat down and wrote something with a pen and paper? was it a list, or a short note to let someone know to feed the cat? i wrote my brother a letter last week and just writing the 4 pages made my hand hurt. i hadn't written a letter for more than a year i'm sure. it made me feel sad to realize it.

i was walking on campus the other day and i took a peak in a chemistry class. every student, and there were a hundred or more in the lecture hall, was on a laptop typing. what does that feel like? all that clicking and the sea of facebook pages open while someone talks in vein at the front. you have the whole world right in front of you with the click of a mouse, there is no need to even look at the guy beside you.

it isn't that i have a problem with technology, well not entirely anyway, but more about how it has changed the way we communicate. now a days you write, revise, and revise some more. you can craft the character you want to be. it used to be that if you liked a boy you would debate calling him for several nights in a row, and then when you finally got up the courage, your hand would be shaking, your words coming out would be awkward and forced. you would be embarrassed. you would know by the inflection of their voice whether they liked you (although you would talk yourself into believing they did anyway). you grew a little every time you did it, by finding the courage and living with the consequences. if you like someone now you send them a text message or an email, it is delightful and witty. it is the perfect you. if you are lucky they write back and pretend to be their perfect them, but you get no tone or context, you are left to interpret the story yourself. if they don't write you back then you pretend it never happened and put it out of your mind. the experience was empty and soon forgotten. there is no tangible moment to hang on to for later, it is just a few words on a screen. it seems like it would be disappointing, but then what do i know?

i found one of my notepads the other day. there are dozens of them in boxes and drawers. mostly stuff i wrote a long time ago, back when i did it all the time. this particular one had a letter that i wrote years ago. i guess it never got sent. it was so great to read it, to remember having feelings like that. it's a record, just as all the angsty monologues i spewed out in the other pages are. it's the time machine i pull out on rainy night to take me back, to realize that this feeling is in me and always has been. so what will come of that? it seems like something we would want to save. i need to write more letters.

the one i found the other night opened with:

"I am stalling already. I am becoming lost in the words. I have never felt this way, thousands of things in my head and nothing coming out of the pen. The reasons are obvious. I am scared. I don't want to say the wrong thing or to say the right thing wrong. These are the things that we do to each other. A modern form of torture that manifests itself in beauty. Longing for the light of a new beginning under this cloud of a feeling that's never ending."

as you can imagine, it didn't end well. but how great would it be to get a letter like that now, written in green with a sketch of a tree in the margin. back in my day...